Rhode Island figured out how to eliminate the biggest way college students are ripped off

Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo announced last
week that seven of the state's colleges will
begin using open-license textbooks this school
year in hopes of saving students at least $5 million
over the next five years.

Open-licensing makes textbooks free to share and
adapt underCreative
Commons. While students can download digital copies for
free,the initiative will mitigate costs associated
with hard copies by placing the burden of production on states or
colleges.

Some of the textbooks will be sourced through OpenStax, a nonprofit based at Rice
University that offers open and free access to textbooks covering
STEM and the humanities. Students can download PDFs from the site
for free or order physical copies printed at cost through
Openstax's Amazon or resellers.

While some places — like California,
British Columbia, and Washington — offer grants to
professors who decide to make their own open-license
textbook, Rhode Island will give "micro-grants" to
professors as financial incentives for the time they spend
finding new textbooks to incorporate into their classes.

The micro-grants range in the "hundreds of dollars," a spokesman
for the Rhode Island governor told Business Insider.
Professors are also urged to adapt or suggest edits to parts of
the textbook to better suit their curricula.

And while there are thousands of free textbooks out there,
professors won't go it alone in finding them.

"We’re in the process of training librarians in the schools
that have decided to join the initiative," Rhode Island chief
innovation officer Richard Culatta told Business Insider.
"They’ll already be familiar with the open-license books that are
already out there."

An example of a chemistry
textbook page from OER Commons.Saylor
Academy

"There are real costs in developing the materials," he told
Business Insider. "Even if you're crowdsourcing it, there are
practical issues around who's going to do it. Are they
compensated, are you relying on your instructors or your faculty
to develop them? Are they trading off research time, teaching
time, or both? And who's going to maintain that?"

While the initiative may have its doubters, the current
numbers show sizable interest.

For example, the number of textbooks available on the
Open Education Resources
Commons, another open textbook site, reaches the tens of
thousands, making the website a Wild West for free
textbooks. Professor and college administrators face the
difficult task of making sense of these policies and turning them
into an operational business — even if the promise of less
expensive education is tantalizing.